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President Obama gave a press conference this week that has been best described as something akin to a temper tantrum.
The entire thing was predicated on Obama's embarrassingly transparent view that he could deflect the light of criticism about his own leadership by blaming Congress for failing to lead. It was also predicated on his view that class warfare sells. A half dozen references later to corporate jets, and we all pretty much got the point.
The press conference didn't get the best of reviews, even from Obama sympathizers such as this Democratic source, not to mention Mark Halperin's ill-timed, frank assessment on Morning Joe.
And now, after Obama's sophomoric attempt at sounding like a serious class warrior, Harry Reid closes out the week by introducing a bill, Sense of the Senate on Shared Sacrifice (pdf).
The bill says that "any agreement to reduce the budget deficit should require that those earning $1,000,000 or more per year make a more meaningful contribution to the deficit reduction effort."
Now, we Americans are, on average, a "two cheers for class warfare" kind of people. We know that the rich shouldn't be chastised for their success, and yet we usually like to see the little guy stick it to the man in our movies, occasionally in real life.
The Reid bill is nothing more than this sappy Hollywood sentiment on a piece of paper filed in the Senate.
There are two things that make Reid's "sense" of what "shared sacrifice" means so utterly ridiculous. The first is the point most conservatives would make. The second, I think, is more important.
(1) The idea that millionaires can make a "meaningful contribution" to deficit reduction is just plain silly. It may be alarming, worrisome, and even a signal of a policy failure that wealthier individuals have done better post-crisis than lower-income families, but adjusting millionaires' revenue upwards with higher taxes won't generate the kind of deficit reduction Reid and his fantasyland colleagues hope for, and they know it. It would be much more effective to introduce the means-testing that exists in both the GOP budget and the Coburn-Lieberman bill, along with eliminating tax expenditures along the lines of what Greg Mankiw has proposed.
(2) The idea that millionaires need to do more to "share the sacrifice" is not based on any sound notion of social justice. Commenting on the bill, Andrew Stiles points us to this chart. It's clear that the sacrifice already isn't "shared." It's aggregated at the top of the income ladder, if by "sacrifice" we mean how much people pay in taxes. So what is Reid's idea of what is "just"? Presumably, a shared sacrifice is based on some fundamental notion of justice. Is justice simply taking from the rich because they have more than they seem to need? That's essentially what Reid's bill sounds like. He throws in a little "deficit reduction" to make the proposed legislation sound a more pertinent to the times.
The Republican idea of justice is simple: all people pay something, the rich pay more than most, and the rich forego subsidies and services that people who are less fortunate receive. Under Reid's and Obama's notion, justice is served simply by depriving the rich of more of their affluence whether a problem is solved or not. Under the Republican ideal, justice is served when everyone pays their fair share to promote the general welfare - and we in fact do promote the general welfare by eliminating debt, providing needed services, and so on. The GOP's Medicare plan is based on this idea, and Coburn-Lieberman gets us a good bit of the way there, too.
So America doesn't really need Reid's "help." The audacity of introducing a bill like this under the guise of "shared sacrifice" before we celebrate July 4, a day on which quite a bit of sacrifice was shared once upon a time, is what we've come to expect from Harry Reid.
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